Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Biohacker Chapter5 (section)

===Part 9===

For a while afterwards, an unpleasant afterimage was burned into the boy’s vision, like he had looked directly into the sun.

“Gah, kah?”

What had happened?

Searching his memories did nothing to tell him why he was where he was.

He was crawling in the mud within the humid summer mountain, but he grimaced and stood up when he felt something unpleasant. Only after moving did he realize how little he could actually move his body. He had taken a beating. His muscles and organs were crying out in protest. The light objects pouring down from overhead were small splinters of wood, similar to chopsticks broken in half. That was all that remained of the log cabin.

Where were Mitsuari Ayu and Kumokawa Seria?

He again tried to search his memories and still found no answer as to what happened.

And…

“Fantastic.”

He heard a horribly out-of-place celebratory voice.

“Ha ha ha! I see, so this is Academy City’s starting point. This is where it all began! I can see how this put Aleister so far ahead of everyone else! I can see how it allowed him to monopolize everything related to science!! But now I have a concrete way of surpassing you. She has awoken, so now I only need to fully control her. Then it will be me! Me!! I will become the fuse that steals away everything you have!! Ha ha ah ha ha ha ha ha!!”

The laughter was maniacal.

This was not about the happiness of humankind or the stability of the world.

That man, Matsuo Ryuusuke, had pulled a deplorable trigger in order to sacrifice all else for his own enjoyment. He had shaken the oldest esper’s mind and awoken her against her will, he had abducted a mind-controlling esper, and it was unclear what had become of the high school girl who had come to rescue that mind-controlling esper.

But. Even so.

Kamijou Touma felt no desire to shout in anger at the scum before his eyes.

Because.

There was nothing left below the man’s hips.

The gruesome cross-section was pasted stickily against a thick tree trunk.

Yet that self-proclaimed winner at life was too busy savoring his triumph to notice his fatal injury.

Kamijou had nothing to say to him.

Even an amateur could tell that was beyond the point of treating.

A creature resembling a small dinosaur lay collapsed nearby. Had it grabbed him in its mouth to escape with him but not made it in time? No, it must have bitten too hard and delivered the finishing blow itself.

Pale-faced and at a loss for words, Kamijou patted his hands across his own body. His sense of pain had numbed over, but none of his body parts had been torn away.

“Ah ha ha!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!! I win! I win!! I am victorious!!”

It felt like watching a villager rejoicing in his leaf coins after a fox or tanuki tricked him. But this was the exact opposite. The moment he realized he had been tricked, it was all over. So it was too pitiful a sight to find anything to say.

“…”

The girl in the old-fashioned hakama-style school uniform moved through the gaps in the trees. She did not see that she had failed to finish off Kamijou or that Matsuo was torn in two so close by.

Kamijou heard a few sounds much like chopsticks being broken in two. Her bare feet were stepping on the underbrush and breaking some small twigs. She did not seem to care about the slope or the path through the woods. She may not have been aware where she was walking or even where she was.

She walked.

She swayed.

Most likely, no one could say for sure whether she was good or evil. And neither answer would change the hell to come. She had awoken. She had no goal or purpose, but she would take action now that she was awake. And who was closest to her?

Her eyes moved.

A large bat fell onto her head and crawled to her cheek. She very nearly had a bat in her eye, yet she did not bat an eye.

Instead, the unnecessarily murderous eyes hidden behind her long, swaying eyes pierced through all of the trees and underbrush to quietly view the survivor there.

In other words, her gaze seemed to stab straight into Kamijou Touma’s eyes.

She let out a roar.

“Gwohhhh!!!???”

It was accompanied by an explosive boom.

There was a popping sound similar to a piece of firewood bursting in the fireplace. Kamijou looked over in surprise and saw an orange firefly flying by. No, that was clearly an ember.

By the time he fully turned to the side, the entire area had transformed into a crimson world.

He thought he may have been thrown in to an illusory world the instant he took his eyes off the Beginning Child, but that was not it. The trees were burning, the ground was scorched and melting, and everything really had become a hell of magma and blazing heat. Everything seemed to have been remade with the hakama girl in the center.

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“Gh!?”

She had not fired anything from her hand and no lightning had struck where she placed her gaze.

The world – the environment itself – had gone insane in the blink of an eye.

(What the hell is this? Some crazy powerful Pyrokinesis!?)

Should he continue on or turn back?

This had all been caused by the Beginning Child who stood at the center, but he did not see how he could possibly approach her. Simply taking too deep a breath felt like it would scorch his throat and lungs. And while his Imagine Breaker could negate any and all supernatural powers, it gave no guarantee he could knock someone out in a single blow. He could not ''just'' recklessly rush toward his foe for a single punch if that foe could strike back to ensure their mutual destruction.

He heard a rustling sound.

The underbrush parted and Kumokawa Seria poked her head out to shout at him.

“Don’t, boy!”

“But Mitsuari is right over there!!”

“Do you ''want'' to take a dip in that lava!? Bear with it for now!!”

A liquid consuming oxygen with its great temperature was not a sight seen in a normal life and that very hell rushed in at him from the side. If Kumokawa had been a moment slower to tug on his arm, he would have been swept away.

“The tanks of anti-creature spray and the ultrasound speakers were destroyed. And they might not have worked on an esper regardless.”

His heartrate shot up and something was wrong with his breathing. The presence of death bore down on his mind.

He did his best to calm his panicking mind by simplifying what he wanted to do here.

What was his goal?

It was not to destroy L.S.S.’s plot and it was not to defeat the Beginning Child.

He did not know where unconscious Mitsuari Ayu was. He could not allow her to be enveloped by the flames, smoke, or magma. If he could not bring this to an end immediately, then what did he need to do?

He knew.

He knew the answer.

But…

“Here she comes, boy. Let’s split up.”

“No.”

“This isn’t the time for a tantrum! There is no way that is ''nothing more than pyrokinesis''. The Board Chairman of all people would never fail to control such an ordinary esper!!”

Kumokawa started to say more, but then she vanished from view.

He saw gray.

White ash and embers poured down. They were so hot he was pretty sure breathing in would be enough to scorch his entire windpipe.

“Senpa-!?”

He clapped a hand over his mouth at the last second. If he had shouted out like normal, he would have burned himself on the inside.

He more slid down the slope than ran away.

He had lost sight of Kumokawa just like he had Mitsuari.

Every second of hesitation let the situation get worse. No one had been able to predict that ash. But if he had taken her hand instead of arguing, they might have been able to prevent that.

(Dammit!!)

He would not let that happen again.

Simply giving into his emotions would not protect the people he knew.

He clenched his teeth so hard he thought they would break and moved away from the source of it all by rolling along a slope so hot it felt like it would have caused a bath to boil.

He was covered in burns, but he had just barely avoided taking a direct plunge into the molten rock.

He broke through some partially carbonized underbrush and shouted back behind him.

“Beginning Child!!”

There was no response.

She did not even glance in his direction. She placed her hand on a nearby tree, producing a sticky sound. Had she touched some sap?

She tilted her head.

Was she viewing the sap itself, the bugs gathered to it, or the small frog hoping to eat those bugs?

The girl with hair swaying like a serpent had no reason to fight, but she also did not seem calm enough to listen.

(Do I really have to fight her!? But she might be another victim of L.S.S.!!)

He heard a strange splashing sound.

An unbelievable sight danced in the corner of his vision and he briefly thought he must have been infected by something. He wondered if this was similar to the “state of delirium” that Matsuo Ryuusuke had mentioned before.

But it was not.

Several drops of water were hanging in the air like round crystal balls.

Then the crimson world was dyed azure, he heard the sound of splitting water, and an all-encompassing flashflood rushed toward him. His feet floated up from the scorching slope. He was tossed about like he had been thrown into a giant washing machine.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!?”

(Is this the Beginning Child’s power too!? Then she doesn’t just have powerful Pyrokinesis!!)

Kumokawa Seria’s prophecy had come horrifyingly true.

The world entirely changed.

Despite how the bark tore into his arms, he desperately held his ground by clinging to a split tree, but he had no idea how long that tree would last. A wild boar large enough to knock him from the ground was helplessly swept away nearby. Once he was taken by the current, it was over.

Would he be torn from the ground along with a large chunk of that ground, or would he be slammed into rocks or fallen trees? The inability to move around made this flashflood even more troublesome than the previous scorching hell.

But what was this?

He felt like Kumokawa Seria would be able to tell him, but she had disappeared.

This power could completely remake the world into one of fire or one of water. He had never heard of anything like that. It seemed to ignore the basic rule of one power per person.

Worse, she was not stopping.

She roared again.

Kamijou wondered if her lack of patience was a flaw, but he soon wanted to punch himself for thinking that. A wind swept in with the biting cold of the Antarctic and then he heard several sounds like cracking plastic.

The water was freezing.

The flashflood flowing down the slope at hip height was slowing and whitening.

“Ahhhhhhhhhh!?”

He may have been lucky he was clinging to a tree.

He clambered up the trunk just before the muddy water he had been soaking in transformed into a land of thick ice. If he had been just a few seconds slower, he would have met the same fate as a frozen mammoth, but he could not rest easy yet.

This cold was enough to freeze all that water in no time at all.

If he was exposed to that while soaking wet, he would not last long.

The hakama girl was not viewing the reality around her. The face behind her long hair had not changed in the slightest even when a bat fell on her head or when she touched a frog with her sappy hand. Her actions were incoherent and unpredictable. It would be extremely dangerous if her attention gathered on him.

But.

If her attack could be focused down to a single direction, he might have chance to negate it head-on with his right hand.

(This is my only chance.)

He was not surrounded by magma or a flashflood.

He could stand on that thick ice. If he started running, he would be able to move right up to the Beginning Child.

She did not seem interested in him.

She did not scream when a large spider crawled up her leg to the side of her hip. She stood blankly at the bottom of the bowl formed by the frozen world around her.

“Ahhhh!!”

He yelled and ran.

But before making it even 5 steps, his vision was abruptly cut off. It was like when the lights were switched off in the middle of the night. He had no idea what had happened. Only that he felt a pain in his cheeks. Almost like needles were shallowly piercing his entire body.

(Sand? Is this a sandstorm!?)

A powerful crosswind shook his body and he lost his bearings while running. The piercing direct sunlight of midsummer was hidden away and the world darkened like they were experiencing an unnatural eclipse. He saw a dark figure through the veil of hot sand, but when he punched it, it was painfully solid. It was no more than an ordinary tree trunk.

“Gh!?”

He grimaced at the dull pain running through his fist, but he had bigger problems.

He had entirely lost his bearings.

He may have been running in circles for all he knew.

(This makes no sense.)

He could not judge the distance or direction, but he clearly heard a scream from somewhere on the mountain.

She really was not paying any attention to him.

At one point, countless lightning strikes poured down on the mountain slope. At another, the mountain slope was covered in geysers that sent 100-degree water erupting from the ground along with steam.

(There’s too much variation. What kind of power would let you do all these different things!?)

He considered the possibility that she could use several different powers, but a Dual Skill was a fantasy and an urban legend. No one had been able to actually do it.

Assuming this really was an esper of the Academy City he knew, that is.

This girl had been too much even for the Board Chairman, so did she really have such an absurd power?

He shuddered, but time was passing while he lost himself in thought.

The hakama schoolgirl parted the sandstorm while still barefoot and appeared before him.

“…!!!???”

She was within arm’s reach now.

But he did not think of this as an opportunity. She was so filled with rage that it actually became difficult to read her more subtle emotions and ''he'' was also within ''her'' arm’s reach. The grim reaper’s scythe was brushing against his throat. Of course he was going to freeze up.

Her mouth opened.

She inhaled to prepare for a roar.

His half-numbed mind knew he had to stop this, but the half that was numbed kept him from moving like he wanted. His mind was fixated on the girl in front of him more than it had on the magma, the flashflood, the frigid ice, or the sandstorm.

He simply stood there.

A moment later, he heard a shockingly cute “pop” and flowers bloomed all around them.

“What?”

He thought his heart was going to burst from his mouth.

This too was a change brought about by the Beginning Child. It was clearly part of her power.

But it was entirely different from the devastating powers demonstrated earlier.

The hakama girl silently tilted her head as if to say this was not at all what she wanted to do. Her long hair swayed and a butterfly fluttered away from her head.

She made her next move before the gears could resume moving in his mind.

She roared.

And almost like the world had suddenly remembered to be dangerous, an unnatural fog surrounded them and his lungs began begging for oxygen. He had a headache like his entire head was swelling, a cold sweat soaked his body, and he doubled over, unable to even scream.

The hakama girl with a rabbit standing at her feet acted like her own scream had been her goal. She did not check to see if the attack had successfully damaged him or not.

(Toxic volcanic gas? No, was this just a change in air pressure!? Is this altitude sickness or something!?)

“Kh, ahh!?”

His throat felt constantly clogged and he slid along the thick ice as if rolling. There was nothing he could do if the air itself was affected. Fortunately, the Beginning Child frequently changed what power(?) she was using, so he only had to keep his distance and hope for a better chance next time.

He repeatedly slammed into tree trunks and fell down the slope like a pachinko ball or pinball until the white ice finally vanished. Some squirrels and mice fled into the underbrush when they saw the boy rolling out onto the bare ground once more, but he was relieved. He may have been imagining it, but he finally felt like he had escaped that strange alternate world.

Anyway, what had happened?

The Beginning Child’s power left no openings. Whether fire or water, it was on too large a scale for him to approach. With that much raw power, he had to wonder if she would be ranked among Academy City’s Level 5s.

But what about that one time?

Just once, she had caused a very nonthreatening change.

Needless to say, that was the field of blossoming flowers. They had not been scattering toxic pollen and they had not been giant man-eating plants. What had been the purpose of that? Or had there been no purpose? She had tilted her head after causing it.

He felt like some crucial hint was hidden there.

First and foremost, it was not possible for a single person to use multiple esper powers. He had to operate under that assumption. So even if her power looked like it could do anything, everything she had done must have branched off from a single starting point.

And a malfunction had occurred there.

To err like that, there had to be a proper method for activating the power.

“Hey, what’s going on!?”

He heard a rustling from the underbrush.

He had not noticed until now, but a small blonde girl was approaching him while cooling her gun barrels with a spray.

“What are you doing back here? Are you preparing for another attack, or are you withdrawing!?”

“Matsuo Ryuusuke is…”

Kamijou bit his lip without finishing that sentence.

This girl was from the hidden side of society where she wielded that Gatling gun to kill the target designated for her.

But he was still reluctant to tell such a young girl what had become of L.S.S.’s president.

One of Amazora’s eyebrows shot up as she guessed what his silence meant and she placed a hand on the heart-shaped opening on the flat chest of her dress.

“Something happened, huh?”

“Yeah.”

Something unprecedented.

Kamijou himself could not explain that threat.

After all, that hakama girl was not even fighting. It was unclear what she was even focused on. With that much power, she truly could destroy the world if unleashed.

“Are you going to keep fighting or withdraw?” asked Amazora. “Let’s narrow it down to that.”

“We can’t back away from this,” he said. “She’s already done enough damage on the mountain. Who knows what would happen to Academy City if she reaches the foot of the mountain.”

“Got it.” The third sister smiled while using the motor to once more rotate the Gatling gun’s barrels. “Then just give the word. My job is to give you the firepower you need.”

He wanted to shout for her to run away.

Academy City’s first esper, the Beginning Child, was on another level altogether. The dinosaur that tried to protect its master had its jaw torn away and L.S.S.’s Matsuo Ryuusuke was taken out of the fight so easily, allowing everything to derail from the already insane track he had laid out. The hakama girl was entirely indiscriminate as she wandered about. But that also meant she showed no restraint or mercy. She truly would activate her power even if there was a baby crawling in her path. Because ''she was not looking at any of this''. No one could predict what would happen, so it would be best to run.

However…

“Here she comes! That’s who you meant, right!?”

“That was fast!!”

It was too late for that.

The barefoot schoolgirl could be glimpsed slowly descending the mountain through the trees. As always, she did not seem to care at all when a fly or roach crawled on her.

Her current height up the mountain was a lot like the countdown to Academy City’s destruction.

Once it was down to zero, everything was over.

If that magma or flashflood poured down the slope like an avalanche, the other two sisters would be caught by it and killed before they even knew what was happening. There was no safety on the mountain. Fully understanding the threat was probably best if they were going to stand up to her.

“That monster can use any sort of attack, including both fire and water. And the effects cover enough of a range to fill a domed stadium!! Facing her head on means getting hit by magma or a flashflood!! Don’t lose your freedom of movement!!”

“Hold on. We’re talking about an esper power here, right?”

“This is no fairy tale! Here it comes!!”

They heard something like a sticky bubble popping.

Then a harsh odor reached them. This must have been what it felt like to soak up to the shoulders in a river full of a chemical cleaner. Kamijou grimaced and felt the stickiness of toxic goop at his feet. He grabbed at a tree trunk to avoid tripping, but it was there too. The entire tree was coated in black and pink goo.

“Ugh!?”

“The hell!? Is this like Riku Onee-chan’s poison!?”

He had no answer for her. This was yet another type of power. The magma and flashflood had at least seemed like a type of natural disaster, but this felt more like manmade environmental destruction.

Could that girl really do anything?

Were there no rules governing the Beginning Child’s power?

“We need to fall back.”

“Running away won’t fix this, Onii-chan!!”

“Start firing and you’ll have this stuff spraying in the air!! And who knows what happens if we breathe it in!!”

“Argh!!”

He and the small girl descended the slope while being careful not to slip. The small bird flying by overhead felt like some kind of sign. He wondered if it had flown away in response to a chemical substance or EM waves that humans could not detect.

He was baffled, but he did understand some things.

The Beginning Child could use everything from magma to flashfloods. And she could apparently make mistakes depending on how she used her power. She could also use a power that was more like pollution than a natural disaster.

And one other thing.

Her power never seemed to be directly targeted at him or Amazora.

The ground and tree trunks had grown all goopy, but their own bodies were not transformed in the same way.

Which meant…

“Was I mistaken?”

“Hm?”

At the very least, her power was not something she launched at a target. Perhaps her power remade the entire field that contained her target.

But why?

What made it change?

She had produced magma, water, ice, a sandstorm, lightning, geysers, altitude sickness caused by an air pressure change, and toxic pollution.

Plus an entirely meaningless flower garden.

If she only had to create a phenomenon that gave Kamijou trouble or harmed him, there had to be more effective ways of doing this. She could have covered the ground in nothing but swords or she could have produced a downpour of spears. There had to be better ways of killing someone, like scattering a bunch of invisible neutrons or dropping a giant meteor on his head.

Yet she was using these more roundabout methods.

If anything, it was like she was using this power for something other than its intended purpose, like beating someone with a giant shovel.

In other words…

“Her power isn’t meant to change humans in any way. Her power causes great change to the environment itself.”

He probably imagined the crawling sound.

This would not have actually been audible.

But there it was.

Some kind of small creature was crawling from the chest of her hakama-like uniform to her throat. It was a small scorpion. Was it native to this mountain, or had it been one of the pets kept in that log cabin?

“Is that her power!? Can she instantly create the environment best suited to the animal of her choice, be it the desert or the Antarctic!?”

Then she roared.

Deep in the mountains where Academy City had a reservoir as its only independent water source, everything was enveloped by a powerful sandy wind with a blazing temperature of 50 degrees.